I have spent a number of hours today looking at and reading the websites for firms in a district of one mile from where I sit to look at how many of them have some kind of online promotion, either in the form of ad-words or search engine optimisation and I haven’t found any yet. This gratifies and upsets me.

It pleases me as, as somebody operating an affordable SEO company, I gleefully look out upon a target rich environment. It dismays me because if I can only collaborate with a small number who regard their website as a crucial division of their business, there are a number who are simply not going to reach potential customers, and may as well have not used their money on a website at all. And the cash may not have been properly spent anyway since I have inspected and it appears that if they have engaged a software consultancy to create their site and maybe host and support it for them, the sites aren’t even catalogued with the search engines so the possibilities of somebody using keywords to find the site are to all intents and purposes, nil.

One of the most basic bits of search engine optimisation is to make certain that the website that is being promoted is registered with all the major search engines, and I would advise anybody, even if they are not having expert search engine optimisation supporting and promoting their site, to make sure they do that. It is very simple and they ought to also ensure that their software consultancy does a sitemap to upload in the registry so that the search engines can at least study the site and familiarise themselves with all pages and the describing keywords.

If we imagine a company’s website we can view it as coming into one of two categories. Either it enhances a trading arm to the business in that it makes sales or can be used for possible clients to visit prior to contacting the company with a view to doing business or registering an interest. The other category is one that is just for informational or ‘read-only’ reasons and maybe provides a news service but is not an important dimension of the work of the business.

If the business falls in any way outside the 2nd category, then some type of online campaign is crucial as from some of the sites that I have studied today, there is nothing amiss with the business or the website but they come nowhere in comparison to their local competitors which is found by the search engines by using some of the keywords used by the website. That is absurd and by engaging an affordable SEO company to promote their site up the results pages they will be more likely to get trade as a result of their website than they presently do. They don’t even need to employ me to do it, though obviously I’d like it if they did, but from the viewpoint of the local economy it would be sensible to maximise their website which is, when all is said and done, a business asset. For goodness sake use it!

It could be that they just don’t know how and see it as an expensive mistake if nobody goes to them via the internet. What I think they don’t understand is that no one is going to come across a site by accident, it must be promoted and search engine optimisation would be the way I would recommend it gets done.